Bill Schrull
Today is one of those bittersweet days. We enjoyed a marvelous worship service which included lots of music, Canon Helen’s Sermon, Deacon ordinations, Communion and ……. more music. The service lasted from 9 AM to 1:30 PM. Yup! Another 4 1/2 hour service. You sort of grow used to it really. There is always something going on during the worship, and there is plenty to participate in, even if our swahili language skills are limited. It was a joy to be here, but there is the sadness looming that we will be leaving early tomorrow morning to catch our flight back to Dar Es Salaam. We’ll have an afternoon, an overnight and most of the following morning there before we head out to the Airport for our trip back to the USA.
Each time I come here, I find myself wanting to stay longer. 2 week in Kasulu does not seem to do it for me. Even when I don’t have as much to do, I find myself craving the community and fellowship of our friends here. Of course, sometimes it can be overwhelming, such as the multitude of celebrations. And we’ve been thanked so much, that it’s hard to find new words to express our gratitude in return. I look forward to a time when we can “blend in” a bit more. For sure we will always be seen as special visitors, but I’m hoping we can transition from being guests to being just the folks who live here from time to time from America and call Kasulu their second home. It’s an achievable goal I think.
So what did we use to do all this blogging you ask (or maybe you didn’t ask)? We found the perfect tool in an iPad app called BlogPad Pro. For years I have used Live Writer from Microsoft on a PC. It’s a great program that offers features that most blogging programs do not have. That includes Mac’s, which is my main computer. I’ve been disappointed by the lack of features in most Mac based blogging programs. Then this spring I found BlogPad Pro for my iPad. Turns out it does everything that Live Writer does and is very easy to use. I recommend it highly to anyone looking for such a tool for this purpose. As you can see, photo’s are a cinch to include. It will automatically reduce them to whatever size you want. And with the battery life of an iPad and a cellular data plan that covers East Africa, I can blog from just about anywhere.
So now we are back in our room, packing things up and doing a little last minute computer work. It turns out that Helen has a new laptop computer that they are giving to a pastor named Jonas. It’s a bare bones Windows 8 system. So I’ve been loading it with software for Jonas to use like LibreOffice (which works with MS Office files and such), Adobe Acrobat Reader, VLC Video Player, AntiVirus software and so on. I just about got it all done accept for Adobe Reader, which is downloading now.
It’s hard to believe that we’ve gone through two weeks here in Kasulu. I’m going to miss this place and our friends. Even so, I’m looking forward to getting home and talking about our experience here with our friend back at St. Paul’s Church. We have a lot to discuss for sure. There is a particular challenge that I want to bring before our leadership. But I’m not going to say what it is now. I’ll leave that to everyone’s curiosity.
So for now, I’ll say goodnight. I hope you all have a great Monday morning. We’ll report in again when we get to Dar Es Salaam. I’m going to include a video of a traditional choir who performed at Murusi Church today. Should be fun to watch, once I get to some bandwidth to upload the entire video.
Canon Bill
Today was a somewhat simple day for us. After a light breakfast we made our way down to KBC for graduation ceremonies. The graduations were for diploma and certificate students. Certificate grad’s did their courses in Swahili. Diploma students did theirs in English and are eligible to go for a bachelors degree (at a different institution or University). The ceremony started with a communion services. Canon Helen Sammons did the preaching. There we other various speaches as well. Since this is the last week for Helen and Alister to be in Tanzania, there were gift exchanges as well. It ended with lunch in the dining hall. I’m glad we could make this event. Cathy and I turned out the be the choir for the service. So we pulled out some favorites of ours that we could sing with the students.
In the afternoon, I spent some time back in the computer room area working on what will be our final setup for the Internet connection. As things turned out, we were unable to get the MiFi devices I had hope would be coming from Dar Es Salaam earlier in the week. But Helen and Alister, being so gracious and charitable agreed to sell their MiFi device to KBC. All I needed to do was to borrow the device for the afternoon and do a switch over test and document it so that someone for KBC can install the device when I am gone. I reviewed the procedure with Reginald who will perform the install. I’m reasonable sure he can manage it as I will also have remote view of the Server just prior and after the switch over from the current Vodacom modem connection. We’ll have to see how that goes as Vodacom dropped the ball this week by having a network problem, which started sometime on Tuesday and has not yet been fixed. The Internet connection has been up and down since, so it’s hard to work on the system with that happening. Please pray that they can get their network working correctly soon!
It’s late now so I think I’ll stop here. I’ll just say that The Lord has been showing me much about commitment and sacrifice during this year’s trip. I’m looking forward to discussing many things with Fr. Joe and the St. Paul’s Mission Committee when we return. Until then,
Bwana Yesu Asifiwe.
Bill